Stephen Fergus / Civilian Reader: What inspired you to write this particular story? And where do you draw your inspiration from in general?

Pat Cadigan: Michael Wilson asked me if I’d be interested in doing a chapbook and I said yes. I’d never done a chapbook before and I’m always up for a new experience. I read the previous ones from This Is Horror and found them all satisfyingly variegated (and quite good). So I prayed to the Story Fairy (Dept. of Horror) and this is what I got.

I know how that must sound. My creative process is a black-box operation and I’ve been at this long enough (34 years professionally) to know what works best for me: tell brain to think, consider the elements involved – genre, length, my personal taste; allow the associations to marinate overnight in REM sleep; return to task the next day, try writing a paragraph, see what happens. The first paragraph written isn’t always the first paragraph of the story and it usually undergoes editing if not outright retro-fitting, depending on what I discover in the course of writing the story.

Paragraphs that don’t work end up in my fragment box for recycling.

SF/CR: How were you introduced to genre fiction?

PC: We met in the dark. We’d already been making out for some time before I said, “Say honey, what’s your name?”

I had a library card for longer than I can remember. My mother would take me to the library with her and find books to read to me. Eventually, I learned to read myself and discovered that all the cool stuff was in the science fiction section. In those days – when dinosaurs roamed the net, before the discovery of flame – the genre wasn’t as stratified as it is now. Everything was science fiction – Heinlein, Bradbury, Clarke, Tolkien, Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast books, Richard Matheson, Jack Finney – anything with a fantastic element was science fiction. Judith Merrill used to edit a best-of-the-year anthology that was the same way – pure-quill hard SF by Mack Reynolds and Walter M. Miller, Jr., sat cheek-by-jowl with oddities from Bernard Malamud, John Cheever, and Tuli Kupferberg. My ambition was to be good enough to get into one of those anthologies. I still want to be that good.